Earth, sun and moon - a bank of resources for Ages 7-11 which will teach pupils that the sun, earth and moon are approximately spherical, how the position of the sun appears to change though the day, and how shadows change as this happens, how day and night are related to the spin of the earth on its own axis and that the earth orbits the sun once each year, and that the moon takes approximately 28 days to orbit the earth.

There is a major fallacy in this activity. The seasons are NOT caused by the varying distance between the Earth and Sun as a result of the tilt of the Earth's axis. The cause of the seasons is the change in how direct the sunlight is. When a hemisphere is tilted in the direction of the Sun, the sunlight is more direct. Also, the Sun spends longer in the sky during this time (summer), and the combination results in warmer temperatures. When a hemisphere is tilted away from the Sun, the Sun is lower in the sky, and the sunlight is therefore less direct and the day is shorter. As a college astronomy professor, I have to deal with the students who are taught incorrectly in younger grades and hold on to this belief of "closer is hotter," which is a very pervasive "phenomenological primitive."